Stephen King Quotes

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Sometimes I'll get ideas in the middle of the night. Sometimes at 3 in the morning I'll get up, and I have a notebook by my bed and have to write it down. I'll dream an idea. Sometimes I see an image online, and I think, 'OK, let's make that a three-layer cake!'

I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

I don't believe in writer's block.

The seed of an idea laying dormant in an old sketchbook is fed the missing ingredient from a new experience. Trying to share some of these experiences, some of the wonders, is one of the reasons why I do books.

I would worry if I wasn't coming up with ideas, if I wasn't inspired.

I'm usually up until around 1 A.M. or 2 A.M. I don't get much sleep - and I prefer it that way, writing notes and coming up with different ideas for two to three hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. or 2 A.M.

I'll stop when I run out of ideas.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

When I'm looking for an idea, I'll do anything--clean the closet, mow the lawn, work in the garden.

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.

When you have that first flash of what you think is going to be a great idea-from the mouth, from the hands-that's an amazing feeling. I don't think anything's quite as good as that.

I get all my good ideas sort of at one o' clock in the morning, and I tried for a while to behave like normal people.

I can't really say - if I've run out of ideas until I've had my next set of ideas.

Ideas come from everywhere - they come from what you see and hear and imagine.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.